Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(43)
“Yes,” he replied.
“Which returns us to my question: Do we have to be this high to see the poems? I’ve seen them before, in alleys, from street level.”
“Codas,” he said. “Fragmentary midcentury additions of the minimalist school. Many of what you thought complete works were cantos of longer poems designed to be read overhead in moonlight at a particular angle.”
“If we’re meant to be viewing works in alleys from overhead,” Tara said, “we’re still too high. I can’t see any building walls from here.”
“You see nothing for which you are not prepared to look.”
Below her, the city turned silver all at once.
An instant before, they’d flown above an Alt Coulumb dark and jeweled as ever. Then, as if they crossed an invisible threshold, the streets transformed to rivers of silver-blue light. From ground level the effect would be too subtle to notice, since light would never strike the right angle for more than a thumb-size piece of pavement. A drunk might see a patch of glory in an alley shadow and mistake it for a streetlight reflection. This was more. The city was built around luminous words.
“Cow paths,” she said.
“Some,” Shale acknowledged. “But how do the cows know which paths to walk? They followed tracks we carved.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“That,” he replied, “is harder.”
*
Cat won three games and Raz two. “Superior strength. Hah.” She sank another ball, missed her third follow-up shot, passed to him; he dropped three, then scratched. “What’s with the whiskey, anyway?”
“I’m in the man’s bar. Passengers on my boat pay for the privilege. Shouldn’t I pay him for his floor space?”
She knocked back her own, and tasted fire and smoke. Then she bent to the table and lined up angles in her head. “We’re paying for the table. And you’re in demand here. Plenty of people would be happy to give you a drink. Not on the dance floor—that’s the only rule. Don’t want the place to get slippery.”
“That’s how you think I work? Canvassing a room of people I don’t know for a taste—”
“I don’t judge. You do what you need to live.”
“I don’t need that.”
“You have to drink sometime.”
“It’s personal.”
“You can tell me.”
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
The angles settled in the green felt’s reflection behind her eyes. Her heart did beat, so she slowed it, and she did breathe, so she waited for the pause after exhalation. The crack of the balls reminded her pleasantly of breaking someone else’s bone.
They finished the game in silence, relating through force and spheres that disappeared into velvet pockets. The band rocked. Four of the booth curtains had been drawn when she came in, and seven were now. She’d seen the seventh curtain close as Raz lined up a shot on the eight ball: two women, one older than Cat, the other younger and rounder, both hungry, and she couldn’t tell which had the teeth. She hadn’t expected to be so aware of the curtains. She liked this place. She liked Walsh. She liked the music. She liked the damn booths and the damn red leather upholstery in them and the stupid paintings of naked women who didn’t look how naked women looked and were all twined round with rose vines and thorns. He missed the eight. She didn’t.
“We saved lives tonight,” she said. “We fought and won. Dance with me.”
“Fine,” he said, though it hadn’t been a question.
He offered her his whiskey, and she took it, swallowed it, set down the glass. Grabbed his hand, smoother than any sailors’ she’d felt. No hemp rope could burn his skin. He followed her with a look on his face like she was a chess problem or a tricky knot he wanted to untie. The whiskey felt good. Girls to the left of them, boys to the right of them, and she pulled him into the valley of the dance.
Music was a way to lose yourself, music good and loud with a pulse you could follow, a double beat that vined through your ears and mouth into veins and spread shoots, leaves, flowers. Drink-sweat and too much perfume and leather and slick vinyl and hair pressed close to her. She smoothed her skirt against her hips and danced. Somewhere a singer sang. There were flowers in her arms and her stomach and deeper. She raised her arms like wings.
And he danced with her. It happened unsteady and slow as new spring, but he did dance. His eyes, which he’d held half-closed since entering the bar, opened, and she saw the whites around his ruby-stained brown irises. By the second song he forgot himself and smiled.
She forgot herself and moved toward him.
There was bass and there was guitar and there were drums and a piano only it wasn’t a piano exactly but some strange machine that worked with spinning cylinders of glass crackling Craft, and bodies pressed them close, and she danced with the crowd and they with her and he with them and then they were together, and the crowd held fangs and blood that called for them and the fangs were white and dark blood flushed faces red and there was so much wanting in this room, wanting to vanish, to be drawn under another’s power into a mouth— She danced with him, and he with her, wound tight as clocks were wound in Iskar, so tight his skin might sing. She touched him. She pulled him toward her. He followed. She kissed him. He kissed her back. Her lip slid between his teeth, and the teeth touched her, and she pressed her lip against them and her skin parted and there was a sharp sharp stab of joy— that all went wrong at once.